Literary history and the Age of Jazz: Generation, renaissance, and American literary modernism

This study investigates the degree to which movements determine the shape of literary modernism in the United States. After providing an archaeological assessment of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance, I trace important aesthetic innovations suggested by these metaphors, including the rise of what I call the "bohemian artist narrative," a self-reflexive genre comprised of artist novels and memoirs. Chapters one ("Unearthing the 'Lost Generation' ") and two ("Rebirthing the Negro Nation") examine, from a sociology of aesthetics perspective, the role of these metaphors in shaping literary production and in determining the scope of critical responses to literary works. Generational and renaissance rhetoric inform a transnational, polyethnic discourse concerned with articulating a cultural nationalist aesthetic stance and archiving the emergence of national literatures. While I begin with the so-called Irish Renaissance of the nineteenth century and end with the Beat Generation of the postmodern era, the primary focus of these chapters is the Jazz Age of the 1910s and 1920s. Chapter three ("''The Invention of Jean Toomer") provides an interpretation of Toomer's Cane (1923) against the backdrop of the book's initial marketing campaign and early reception history in order to demonstrate the influence of the tropes of the Lost Generation and Harlem Renaissance. Chapters four ("American Modernism is Born") and five ("The Modernist Generation") examine an important development in twentieth-century aesthetics, the modernist preoccupation with narrative self-reflexivity. My primary concern is with the thematic expression of reading and writing practices; specifically, as these are realized in bohemian novels and memoirs. The rapid proliferation of the bohemian artist narrative in the U.S. reveals a growing concern not only with the inner world created by literature, but also with the outer world in which literature is created, including the social worlds imagined as the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance. I demonstrate how writers as diverse as Oscar Zeta Acosta, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Clellon Holmes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Henry Miller, Diane di Prima, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams imaginatively conceive of American literary emergence in terms of symbolic birth (or rebirth) into a generation.